


what the living won't let go

by mumblefox



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Post-Season 2, Space Tourism, aliens??? yes, metaphysical adventures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-28
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-06 22:51:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11610609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblefox/pseuds/mumblefox
Summary: After their battle with Zarkon, it takes Shiro a moment to realize that something's a little strange. It takes him even longer to fix it.





	what the living won't let go

**Author's Note:**

> a bajillion thanks go to my artist, [bajillionkittens](http://bajillionkittens.tumblr.com), who provided the exceptional art of one of my favourite scenes <3

 

* * *

 

When Shiro blinks his eyes open, the first thing he sees is the shrapnel.

It’s hard to distinguish from the stars, at first. His vision is blurry, in that first moment, and the pieces are small enough that when they catch the light from the castle, they twinkle, adding another tiny light to the stellar backdrop.

It might have been beautiful, but Shiro knows what it is.

Behind, around, above - in every direction - is the debris of the battle that had shattered Zarkon as fully as it had shattered Voltron. It’s possible his body is out there in the debris field, floating just like the lions. Alive. Recoverable.

There’s nothing Shiro can do about it. Nothing except hope that they’ve done enough, this time, to end Zarkon for good. Maybe it should bother him, that he’s hoping for someone’s death. It doesn’t. He doesn’t care. His only job now is to get everyone out of this safely.

“Check in, team Voltron. Is everyone alright?” he says into his comm, but there’s no sign his HUD is even functioning. There are no cracks in his visor, and no suit breach as far as he can tell. It should have power - Altean tech is powered off bioelectrics, most of the time; if he’s alive, it should have power. Maybe a problem with the receptors? Or...batteries? Does his suit have batteries?

Doesn’t matter. He’s got to move. The shrapnel glitters, the twinkling hue shifting to a sickly purple as the lights of Zarkon’s ship start flickering back online. The drone ships are starting to move.

At least the other Paladins are okay. Out the dim windows of Black’s eyes, he can see their lions twitch and wake, can hear their exhausted voices come back on comms. They sound distant, somehow - so muffled that it’s like the comm unit is sitting in the next room. Shiro strains to hear them. They’re all accounted for, at least. It’s a miracle, how much easier it is to breathe once he’s heard each of their voices.

They’re moving. The black lion, however, is not. She’s languishing, powered down.

“Guys? I’m gonna need a pickup,” he says, but then his lion shudders as a pair of jaws clamp down on her. Red and Green are already there, dragging him back to the castle. The Galra ships are pivoting towards them, engines firing. They’re running out of time.

He can’t just sit there. Shiro shakes his head to dispel the lingering fuzziness, reaches for his connection with Black. It’s not easy. Shiro feels a drop in his stomach, like almost tipping a chair over backwards, as he reaches for her, and he reacts instinctively to regain his balance.

Shiro grabs for one of Black’s control sticks, and misses

He rearranges his posture into military precision, holds himself very still. Okay, that isn’t good. Concussion, maybe? Some worse kind of damage? He squints one eye closed, then the other, but his depth perception seems to be working fine. He grabs again, more carefully this time, and misses again.

A tiny terror takes root in his chest. He doesn’t know what’s going on.

“Allura? Keith?” His voice is muffled in his ears, strangely flat. A helmet malfunction, maybe. Nobody answers.

The black lion’s console isn’t active. His bayard, newly recovered, is still stuck in attack position. Shiro takes a second to breathe, to convince himself he’s safe in here. The castle is just ahead; they’re going to make it. Then he tries the comms again.

“Guys? Can anyone hear me?”

The lions pile into the main hangar. The doors close; Shiro waits to feel the shivery pulse that means they’ve entered a wormhole. And he waits. And waits. Maybe he missed it, or maybe they’re hiding instead of running. Doesn’t matter, he reminds himself. All that matters is his team. He has to go check in, calm their nerves, walk everyone through the adrenalin comedown. They need him, right now.

So Shiro stands, and that’s when he really starts to notice.

His stomach cartwheels gently with every movement. The gravity is - here, but not quite right, in a way he can’t figure out. It’s that tipping-chair feeling, that missed-a-stair lurch in the pit of his stomach. The edge of panic.

It’s a feeling he’s had plenty of practice managing. His lion is lying on the floor. When he tries to open the hatch, she ignores him.

“Guys, I need someone to let me out,” he says, knowing it’s futile. No one answers. Where there should be a faint, almost undetectable buzz of electricity as the comm registers his voice, there is none. It’s dead space in his ears. He yanks his helmet off, thumps a fist against his own hipbone, half as a test and half out of frustration.

He’s solid enough. Maybe this has something to do with the black lion, with the astral plane where he’d fought Zarkon, with why she hasn’t woken yet.

But something tugs, just underneath his ribcage, a sensation like a rubber band being pulled out and out and out. He doesn’t know what it means.

The tiny terror has grown. It’s sprouted little flowers of suspicion, of dread. Shiro takes a deep breath, and doesn’t feel the air moving into his lungs, doesn’t feel it as he exhales. He drags a shaking hand over his face, forces himself calm. He doesn’t panic often; it’s a skill that kept him alive as a gladiator, and it’s a skill that will carry him through whatever this is, too.

His mind skirts the edge of that thought, without really looking over. In that direction lies a long fall. But the thought is there, unavoidably: he’s trapped in a small, dark space with a door he cannot open himself, waiting for someone to come for him.

From outside, he can hear muffled shouting. Shiro stands, helmet in hand, and watches his team pry Black’s hatch open.

The lights of the hangar bay spill inside, and Shiro’s heart skips to see them, to have them all there, safe and alive. The memory he’d been fighting back dies in the light.

“Hey, team Voltron,” he says, and his voice is wobbly even in his own ears.

“Shiro?” Keith says. He’s the first one through the door, quick footfalls echoing like deafening drumbeats on the metal. Shiro holds out a hand.

And Keith runs right through him.

Shiro doesn’t feel it. Keith is before him, and then Keith is behind him, and the others follow.

The tiny terror blooms full and sudden. It pushes choking leaves up into his throat.

“No,” says Shiro, and they don’t hear him. They’re staring at his empty chair, at his bayard, still stuck in attack position.

“He’s gone,” says Lance, and the silence that follows is absolute.

Black hasn’t come back online. Her emergency lighting is on, a sea of soft blue and tiny, purple dots, a strange starscape. Keith tries halfheartedly to turn the bayard, but it’s locked.

Allura drags herself out of her shock and starts tapping at Black’s console, trying to convince her to open a diagnostics screen, to open anything. Nothing moves. “The lion isn’t damaged, not any more than the others,” she says testily. “Why is it doing this?”

“Let me try.” Pidge worms her way in. Shiro already knows that she’s not going to be successful, either.

Doesn’t know how he knows. Just knows. Black is far away, stubborn and searching, an echo in his heart he can’t find the source of.

Looking for him, he realizes.

He doesn’t know what that means.

 

* * *

 

There’s nothing he can do about it, so Shiro just...drifts.

Guilt gnaws at him, but it’s distant, somehow. Almost like it isn’t even his. Just an echo of an emotion someone else is feeling. Had been feeling. Would feel.

Time slips between his fingers, intangible. The flow of it like air, the ebb like water. Coming and going all around him, invisibly. The guilt is tied to that, somehow. He can name it, see its source. That doesn’t mean it actually touches him, wherever he is.

One by one, his team trickles out of the black lion’s cockpit. Shiro couldn’t have said which of them go first, which follow after. Some piece of them stays behind when they go, like multicoloured fingerprints pressed all over each other. But he’d known Keith longest; even under the colours, Shiro recognizes the grief in his posture, in his breathing. It’s Keith who stays the longest. After the shades of the others have long gone, Keith stays, hand on Shiro’s chair.

Without meaning to, Shiro moves.

It isn’t a movement he consciously directs, and not one he remembers making. He sees Keith’s shoulders, shaking silently, and then Shiro is before him. Shiro’s hands ache with how badly he wants to reach out, to grab Keith by the shoulders. To be felt and seen and heard and known. To be present.

He doesn’t let his hands move from his sides. He can’t bear to watch them go through Keith the way Keith had gone through him, earlier.

So he just watches. Keith’s face is a bleak ruin; Shiro has never seen this expression on him, knows it isn’t one Keith would ever allow anyone to see. He should turn away. He should give him privacy. He should.

But he doesn’t. He just stays nearby as Keith wrestles himself back to order, a process that twists his face and burns his eyes and which nearly - so nearly - boils over twice. Each time, Keith fights it back with the iron will Shiro had always known was in him, which Keith is only now starting to utilize instead of fear.

They’d spoken of it. Shiro had seen it. When he’d appeared to Keith as a - what? hallucination? hologram? - during the trials, it hadn’t been that Keith wanted to see him, specifically. Keith had been afraid: that his stubbornness was the wrong choice, that he was being bullheaded, and that he just couldn’t see it on his own. He’d hoped that someone would show up and make the choice for him.

And he’d been afraid that Shiro would leave him behind if he chose wrong. If he decided to trust himself anyway. There was - and still is - a rough edge in Keith that comes from always wanting to have the right answer, even when there isn’t one. He always wants, so badly, to do what’s right.

It may take only a moment for Keith to get himself back together, to bury what he needs to. It might take an age. There isn’t any way for Shiro to know for sure. Keith’s hand, on the back on Shiro’s chair, curls into a fist and thumps down once, firmly, hard enough to hurt. And then Keith turns and walks himself out of the cockpit as well.

All at once, and finally, Shiro is alone.

Guilt. Keith needs him. His team needs him. He can’t leave them, not now.

He’d sworn to himself that he wouldn’t leave them.

And he hasn’t, he tells himself. He didn’t choose this; he hasn’t left anyone behind. He’s not to blame.

They’re his team, but they’re safe. They’re all together and safe. He doesn’t have to worry about them just now. All he has to do is find a way back to them.

Shiro reaches for calm and finds it. He’s a silver linings sort of person, and it isn’t so hard to see the good in whatever this is, really. It’s a break, if he can let it be. It’s a chance to rest. To look back at what used to scare him without flinching, for once. To get a handle on himself.

With that in mind, Shiro starts to organize. What does he know for sure? He’s not on the physical plane: he can’t touch anything, and no one can tell he’s there. He’s not on the astral plane where he’d fought Zarkon: he’d still had a sense of being in his body, and he’d been definitively somewhere else, even though his body hadn’t moved.

Right now, his best guess is that he’s between those two extremes. He’s not in his body, and not entirely in his mind, either.

This feels like it had when he’d taken Zarkon’s bayard - _his_ bayard - right out of his hand. There and not. Somehow between.

Not a definitive answer, but one he can live with. What else does he know? He can move, but not in ways he’s used to. Gravity doesn’t exist, and neither does weightlessness. He can just...place himself. Too weird to think about, for now.

There’s the guilt, the everything else, that tugs at him, like a memory he only half-recalls. Like a dream. He examines the strangeness of that feeling, recognizes its presence, and then lets all of it slip away. He doesn’t need it right now. It won’t help.

What does he know? He knows he’s fine. There’s that pull - in his chest, under his ribs, somewhere indescribably deep inside him - growing ever incrementally tighter, something like inevitability. It’s fine. He’s fine. Tired, still, but less so. Scared, a little, but less than he should be. Not hungry or cold or injured. Not tense or afraid or nauseous.

Just himself. Muted, but calm.

Safe, maybe.

Is this what that feels like? He can’t remember.

He scrubs a hand through his hair, puffs out his cheeks with a breath that isn’t air as much as it is thought. It occurs to him that he’s only breathing out of habit, really, but that’s one habit he’s glad to hang onto.

He lets go of his helmet, and it stays where it is: chest level, stationary instead of weightless. A pin stuck in the fabric of the world. He steps out of his armour the way someone would step out of smoke, by letting it simply flow off of him. The flight suit stays; it’s good enough.

This time, Shiro moves on purpose. He concentrates, thinks of Allura. Opens his eyes on the bridge, dizzy with adjusting to being somewhere so different so quickly.

Allura is with Coran; they each have their heads bent over a screen, and they’re furiously tapping away at them. Allura searches a map, makes notes in 3-dimensional space. Coran feeds her data. They’re not talking much, and when they do, Shiro can’t understand them. The translator tech doesn’t reach him, here.

It’s nice, in a way. He can’t feel bad about eavesdropping when he can’t understand what they’re saying. He lets himself drift above them, letting the lyrical Altean tongue wash over him, a comforting white noise. Every once in a while, he catches his name. He looks down, once, and Allura has her hand pressed to her mouth as she continues to make notes. It’s a fierce expression, an emotion he recognizes but can’t bring himself to feel right now.

She’s a leader, even more so than he is. Shiro knows how it feels to lose part of your team. It’s not her fault; she has to know it’s not her fault. But he can’t tell her.

“Coran,” Allura says, and her voice cracks down the middle of his name, and Shiro pulls himself somewhere else. He doesn’t know her well enough to intrude.

He doesn’t plan to end up with Hunk next. It makes sense, though. Hunk is the most emotionally aware member of Voltron, the most supportive. He’s strong in ways that Shiro isn’t, that the rest of them aren’t.

Hunk isn’t alone. He’s on the couch in the debriefing room, and Lance is next to him. Lance’s feet are drawn up onto the seat and he’s got his arms wrapped around his knees. Hunk’s hand rests between his shoulder blades, even though they’re both still in armour and there’s a slim chance Lance would be able to feel it.

Lance’s cheek rests on one of his knees. Shiro has never seen him so cramped. He’s never seen Lance look so small.

“-thing we did wrong,” he’s murmuring to Hunk.

“It’s not,” Hunk says. His voice is firm, but his posture is not. He’s splayed out, exhausted, his head tipped back over the edge of the couches.

“It could be,” Lance says, and then he turns his face away with a groan. “What if they got him while we were passed out? What if he’s -”

“Lance.”

Lance stops, but his arms pull tighter. Shiro can’t see his face, and doesn’t want to. His voice is hard enough to bear.

Shiro pulls himself away.

Without planning to, he finds himself with Pidge.

After the quiet of Allura, Coran, Hunk, and Lance, Shiro’s expecting...well, not this.

Pidge has cranked up the music in her workroom. The din is enough to make the pile of screws on her worktable rattle. Bits and pieces of her armour are lying scattered over the floor where she’d either thrown them, or dropped them as she raced around. It takes him a moment to see her amongst the chaos of her space. She’s tucked into the guts of some hunk of machinery, and sparks are flying from within it. Shiro can’t hear the metal screeching over her music, but he knows it’s there. She hadn’t even paused to change out of her flight suit.

The sparks stop flying, and Pidge braces a foot against the machine, yanks hard. There is a clatter and then a stream of fluent cursing that he _can_ hear over the music, and a machine part - some contraption of wires and chambers and valves - comes sailing out. Shiro, on reflex, reaches out to catch it, and the part passes cleanly through his hands, then his hips, to hit the floor with a catastrophic sound.

Pidge doesn’t seem concerned. She peels herself out of the machine, and her face is streaked with grease, and her eyes are red from where she’s been crying.

She drags her sleeve across her eyes, unbothered, and doesn’t slow down. Pidge scoops up the part and slaps it down on her work station. Her mouth is moving: she’s talking to herself, but softly. Shiro can’t hear what she’s saying, doesn’t know that he wants to. She chose the music, after all. If she’s hiding away, he’s going to respect it.

There is something reassuring in watching her work, even if he doesn’t know what she’s doing. There’s a singular focus to it, a driving purpose, a goal being approached. It’s an echo of inevitability, twin to the stretching feeling he’s got deep in his gut. Like it will snap at any moment, and everything will be solved.

“Pidge,” he says, testing, because there’s a part of him that thinks - if anyone will have an ear turned to the impossible, it’s Pidge. “I’m here, right here. It’s me.”

She leans back, scratches her head, heaves a sigh. Presses her eyes to her sleeve and comes away with a new black streak above an eyebrow. Shiro reaches out to thumb it away, and stops before he can make that mistake again.

But he’s trying: no more flinching. Shiro collects himself, leans sternly on his fear. And he reaches out again.

His hand passes through her ruffled helmet hair. It’s what he was expecting. It still stings.

It’s time to go. He’s so proud of her, of how fierce she is, of how hard she fights to keep what’s hers. Of how smart and quick and clever she is, of everything she’s going to build, of everything that will be better because she exists. And she reminds him: of Matt and Sam Holt, of Kerberos, of the shining, smiling version of his past self that the Galra crushed into the dust.

When he looks back at himself, he does it with kindness. That Shiro was whole and proud and naive, and no one would ever know who he would have become, if things were only a little different.

Shiro looks back on the pilot of the Kerberos mission as though he were a different person entirely. Maybe he is. Maybe he was. But being here with Pidge seems to close that gap, even if only a little. She reminds him of what he could have been.

And, ah. Time to go. It’s just more than he can bear right now.

He goes to Keith. He doesn’t mean to do that, either.

Keith is alone - still, again. He’s rummaging around in some storage room, lids yanked off of crates, insides spewed haphazardly.

His arms move jerkily, tight outbursts of movement. It reminds Shiro - of - of -

Something huge looms within him - a feeling that builds like an oncoming sneeze, an oncoming migraine. It reminds him of digging.

Reminds him of -

grey sand under his fingernails, blood black as ink splattered before him, a negative image of the night sky, and

his own breathing loud in his ears as he scrabbles for his weapon, and

something roaring, bearing down. Something big. Something _fast._

He remembers his fingers hitting hard metal. Remembers the terrible, jarring strain of thrusting the pike into the creature’s body until it stopped spasming. Remembers its blood steaming on the sand.

The flashback doesn’t cost him. He lets it glide through him, like a wave that swells and passes without breaking. It can’t touch him here.

When he surfaces, Keith has started gathering his findings into a bag. He leaves the room in disarray, but palms the switch on his way out. Shiro ducks out of the way before Keith walks right through him.

Shiro wants to follow, wants to see what he’s gathered. Wants to know what he’s going to do. This is the first time he’s tried to move in one direction, continuously, and he can’t. He blinks, and is beside Keith once more. Blinks to his side. Wonders if Lance is okay. Blinks and -

Hunk has pulled Lance over so that his head lies on Hunk’s leg. Lance has both his hands clasped around one of Hunk’s. Neither of them are talking. Hunk might be asleep, but it’s hard to tell.

Their eyes carry bruises at their edges, the memory of too little sleep, of fights only barely won. Of stress that Shiro should be there to distract them from, to talk them out of. Being stuck like this would be fine, except he can’t do his damn job.

Not his fault. He can’t start that again.

Time has passed, but there’s no way for him to know how much. When he focuses back into the moment, Hunk and Lance have gone from the couches, from the lounge. Shiro hopes they’ve gotten out of their armour, that they’re getting some rest. They deserve it. They work so hard.

He runs through the same mental checklist he visits at least four times a day. Pidge is okay. Lance is okay. Hunk is okay. Allura is with Coran; they’re both okay. And Keith -

Shiro finds himself back in the black lion’s cockpit. It’s different. It’s no longer empty, for one thing. The light is strange, for another.

Keith is there, on his knees on the metal plating. A harsh snapping sound ricochets strangely inside the enclosed space: he’s cracking glow sticks. The light is ghostly, soft, where it bleeds from between his clenched fists, where it bleeds into his hair, onto his strained face. Keith drops them, one by one, into clear jugs full of water, and their light softens, diffuses. Fills the entire space.

“I hope this is okay,” he whispers, and Shiro almost answers before he realizes that Keith is talking to Black.

His reply dies in his chest. It’s like swallowing an ice cube whole.

“You helped me save him once before,” Keith continues. “I just...don’t know what else to do.” He settles himself down on the bulkhead, and Shiro notices the blanket spread on the floor. Keith shrugs out of his jacket. “On Earth, this is what we do when sailors get lost at sea. We light lamps for them, so they can find the shore again. Or I think we do. I lived in the desert.” He snorts a laugh as though this was the height of humour. “I should’ve known that I was an alien. Never was much good at being human.”

He folds his arms on the pilot’s seat, then settles his head down on them. Curls up like that, with his face next to the biggest lantern, and closes his eyes in its glow. And he just stays there, in his makeshift nest, with his lanterns spread around him. Making of the war machine a beacon, lighting the way.

 

 

The dark corners that the glow sticks don’t reach might be endless, as far as Shiro can tell. Black doesn’t even flicker. Two small blue lights pulse on her console, like a heartbeat, and that’s all there is, just this vast quiet and the tiny lights and the lanterns and Keith, whose ragged edges are bleeding into all of it.

All at once, this isn’t something Shiro can bear. The lights have shaped the cockpit into an emptiness he recognizes, and it’s bigger than the guilt, bigger than the memories, bigger than the worry. Maybe it’s just that Shiro knows what it’s like to be on an alien craft without any hope of going home soon. It’s a loneliness he’s borne before, and he can’t stand to see it in Keith.

He can’t say anything, can’t make it stop.

All he can do is go.

So Shiro goes.

As before, he moves without really meaning to. Without a destination in mind.

This move takes longer than the others had, by a matter of seconds, or a matter of decades. There’s no way to tell. Time and distance are a piece of the same dough, stretched and refolded within him.

When Shiro’s eyes focus, it takes him a moment to figure out what he’s looking at.

All he can see is colour. It’s a soft pink shot through with rich yellow, and it’s everywhere, plush and cottony, as far as he can see in every direction. Buried in the clouds are little clusters of bright pinpricks. He feels the energy that holds the colours together, that binds each particle into a mass.

It’s a nebula. He can feel its edges like he can usually feel the boundary of his own skin. Can feel its centers of gravity, where new stars are being spun into being, as though they are growing within his own chest.

The clouds of colour seem to fold around him as he wanders the nebula, from one nursery to the next. They weigh on him like a heavy blanket. He welcomes it. Pulls the clouds closer. Keeps drifting, with them tangled around him.

The Earth’s sun might have been born in a place like this, he thinks. Maybe Altea’s was. He hopes they were. He hopes that his skin has known the touch of light collected from something as beautiful as this.

A moment of dissonance, then, as there always is when he thinks about his body. For the first time in what feels like years, Shiro looks down at his Galra arm.

This is a place out of time. He sees the metal plating, sees the incomprehensible machinery inside that moves it at his will. But he also sees his skin. Because he’s here and he’s looking, he sees his bones, the puzzling artistry of how they connect inside his palm and wrist. He sees all of it at once, the past and present endlessly overlapping. They’re both him, both his. One form doesn’t equal the other, but they are both his.

He flexes his fingers. Then he brings his hand up to his chest and holds it there, close, while he lets himself drift through the nebula.

There’s more to existing, here. The endless, invisible song of gravity and time plays somewhere under his skin. Shiro wonders what kind of symphony this place would make to someone who could hear colours, and then finds that the more he relaxes in this place, the closer he gets to hearing it himself. As though it’s the next track on a favourite playlist, or the next page of a favourite book. Just a fraction away in time or effort. Right where he can almost grasp it.

He can’t hear it yet. He thinks if he stayed here long enough, he might. So he indulges himself: spends time drifting, wonders what it would be like if every sense was tied to the others, so that opening your eyes here was like ice cream in the park on a warm day, or dinner on a riverboat at night.

The colours fold around him, and he lets himself sink into them, lets his gaze slip from new star to new star as they curl around each other within their pods of light. Somewhere beyond the clouds of the nebula, the vacuum waits. The universe waits. He can feel the blankness of it, and can feel it being held at bay by the pure creation that surrounds him.

He drifts. For the first time in ages, Shiro sleeps.

It isn’t a true sleep. He doesn’t dream. Maybe he doesn’t even close his eyes. It doesn’t matter. Here is a place where a heart can be made anew, where the breaks can be forged out. Here, in the nursery of galaxies, some old shadow is finally, with gentle hands, pressed out of Shiro’s mind.

 

* * *

 

When he wakes - when he filters all his scattered pieces back into himself, as though he were his own nebula condensing into a single star - Shiro has moved.

Around him is nothing.

Perhaps it isn’t correct to say nothing, but that’s his first impression. The nebula is gone, and there are no planets, no debris fields, no clumps of gas. There are pinpricks of light, ubiquitously: distant stars, and none large or bright enough to stand out.

He’s seized by memory: of lying flat on his back on prickly grass, limbs stretched to the extremes of his most recent growth spurt, his body feeling big and new and strong. There was the great, overturned bowl of the sky above him, with its bright glazing of stars, and no trees or streetlights in his peripheral. There was nothing in his eyes, at that moment, but the sky.

There’s more to the memory, but it’s faint. He remembers the long drive, the way the dust of the dry country roads kicked up and through his open window. Remembers the way the oncoming headlights caught on the dash, on his knuckles on the wheel, until he got far enough outside the city that those stopped. Remembers the way it felt to occupy a moment completely. To know who he was. To set responsibility aside, if just for a night, to do what his soul needed.

And, well - maybe this is what he needs, now. To see the stars. To remember that, once, staring out into the endlessness made him dream instead of fear.

Around him is nothing. He knows he should go back to the castle, should check in on his team, should use this ability to spy on the Galra, should -

Should.

There are so many things he should do. But what he wants to do is just _be_. He doesn’t think that’s too selfish, right now. He thinks he can accept it, even if it is.

Shiro turns gently in the center of the blank spot, letting his brain get reacquainted with how dizzyingly vast the universe is, with what each of those pinpricks of light represents. With how small a piece of the whole he can see from here.

He shakes the grip of his lingering sense of responsibility the same way he’d sloughed off his armour, earlier: by concentrating on it just hard enough to step right out of it. His shoulders straighten, even though there isn’t weight here; his head lifts, even though nothing has been bowing it but himself.

The distant stars whirl in his eyes, streaks of light, a timelapse of possibility. Shiro focuses on one at random. It welcomes him, a feeling like a flower blooming in his chest, like an ember being blown to life inside cupped palms.

This is okay. He gives himself permission to go. When he leaves, his guilt and responsibility and fear and anger are left behind him.

 

* * *

  
The more he sees, the more he travels, the more Shiro realizes that he’s drawn to life.

There is so little of it, really. So many uninhabited planets, so many inhospitable moons, so many stretches of endless nothing between the galaxies. So many stars that burn too hot and asteroids that spend millenia traveling through no light at all. The myriad probabilities of atmosphere and gravity and chemical composition, the puzzles of evolution and adaptation, the luck that’s involved in every atom of a being coming together to miraculously form sentience, to form life. All the math he’s ever known tells him that being alive at all is almost impossible.

But still, every time he moves, there’s something.

When Shiro next condenses into a single time and place, there are trees soaring over his head, hundreds of feet tall. The sunlight filters down through their branches, and Shiro closes his eyes for a moment as though he can feel the dappled shade of it on his face. Something in him feels it. Maybe that counts.

He turns his head as music drifts through the trees, and he moves without thinking. There are creatures, here, singing together as they harvest fruit from the trees. They are twelve-legged, long-bodied. The front third of their bodies is lifted off the ground, and in the dip of their spines rest baskets. Some are being filled with fruit, and others are already filled with broods of squirming children. Their fur is a soft lilac colour, precisely the colour of the sky. Their singing is contained to the echo chambers of their lungs, but when they all sing together, the sound is a soothing, euphoric hum that punches Shiro right in the chest.

It's lovely, but it is not a song he can sing. It isn't for him. Whoever these people are, he will never matter to them; as far as they're concerned, he has never existed.

Cosmic insignificance. Maybe it should scare him to think that nothing he does will ever matter, not on the scale of the universe. Not even as Voltron - not if they succeed, and not if they fail. The stars don't care about the Galra empire. It will never touch every corner of all that there is.

No matter what, there will be singing. It's enough.

Shiro turns his eyes to the sky. He can’t see any stars from down here, but it doesn’t matter. He carries the song inside himself as he goes.

He opens his eyes to rain, gasps as the wall of sound hits him. It’s so familiar, so achingly removed from what his life has been, recently, and he’s ripped back into memory again: frantically paddling a canoe across a lake as the skies open, breathless with laughter as whoever paddles behind him shrieks with it. Feeling at once drenched and untouchable, young and competent, heart-full, glowing.

A sound snaps him out of it. The rain falls on buildings: tall, metal-framed ones, stacked like bulbous lumps growing out of each other. It takes him a moment to locate the source of the sound, but he finally looks up. A pair of creatures circle each other in the downpour, leathery wings sluicing water off in shimmering arcs. One goads the other higher, shrieking a challenge, and they race in laborious spirals, daring each other to keep up, to do better, to be better.

Shiro smiles. That instinct is one he recognizes. It’s one that he and Keith used, lifetimes ago, to goad each other towards the stars. The rain falls through him, doesn’t touch his face. It hits the ground hard enough that a fine mist springs back up from the hard stone, making the planet’s surface hazy and indistinct, almost unreal.

Shiro closes his eyes and tips himself back and, gently, away. The rain drums on his bones. The song swims through his veins.

He’s moved again. This time, it’s a market that bustles. The open square is bordered by trees that drop bioluminescent leaves in dramatic flurries of bright blue and orange. The stalls are dug into the ground rather than built up, and they are populated by enormous beetle-like creatures with shimmering shells inlaid with gems and patterns and paint. They bustle, chattering, tucking packages under their hard-backed wings, antennae waving.

He’s never been to a market like this. He’d been a city kid, then a Garrison one, then a prisoner. This market doesn’t remind him of anything. It still, somehow, makes him stronger. He realizes that what he’s been seeing is community, but this is hearty in a way he has never experienced, wholesome and fresh and open.

Shiro settles himself beneath one of the trees, stretches out on his back. He can’t feel the grass beneath him, can’t feel the shimmering, electric blue leaves that tumble around and through him. He’s happy to watch them fall, beautiful and completely unremarked-upon, a miracle of colour that’s only miraculous because he’s here to see it. The beetles pass - busy, purposeful, as vibrant as the foliage - on his periphery.

For an age, he just listens. When the sun starts to sink, they light some lamps and start to pack up. The glow is soft and pink and reminds him of other lanterns, in another place. Shiro closes his eyes. He reaches for the sky with all his heart.

On the next planet, it’s dark. Above him, the sky is lit by an aurora, by shimmering curtains of colour that reflect on the ice below. It’s a cold planet, to be sure, but Shiro doesn’t feel it. All he feels is that rubber-band sensation, getting incrementally tighter every second. He can ignore it, for now. It isn’t urgent.

One of the auroras breaks apart from the others in a way that Shiro recognizes as not quite right. It’s quick, sudden. Sentient. He looks again.

It’s not an aurora. It’s a herd of creatures. Their bodies are wavelengths of light, and their conversation is a song that has been going on for centuries. Shiro feels the stretch of it, backwards in time and forwards, a song for the unending, breathless joy of existing.

Time starts to spin. He watches ice melt away, exposing wet earth to the sky; watches seeds grow to bending trees, turn to jagged, burned-out husks, crumble to ash that sprouts new life; the shadows crawl across the surface as the seasons change; volcanoes push islands up out of the sea; the river carves a canyon, quick as blinking. He isn’t sure if these are the same planet, or different ones. Isn’t sure it matters.

There are more, after that. A species of half-shadow asteroid-hoppers living in the harsh environment of a gas giant’s rings; a planet of mismatched creatures, variously feathered and furred but living contentedly in multi-species groups; a bustling port, glittering in space like a jewel, with ships flowing in and out in ceaseless rivers; a moon made entirely out of crystals that have voices he senses rather than hears; giant deer-like creatures with small sloths riding low on their necks.

The sloths are...strange. As Shiro nears them, their heads turn, slow and ponderous. Their great round eyes squint curiously. For the first time since this started, Shiro can tell that they’re somehow looking directly at him.

The band pulling tight inside him thrums like a plucked string. Ripples of himself echo out into the universe as Shiro gasps and yanks himself away from the symbiotes. He knows he’s never met them, but they’re so familiar, so familiar. The incomprehensible vastness of some other reality looms close, for just a moment, and is swept away.

The band inside him thrums again. Shiro lets himself look along the length of it. Someone is on the far side; someone holds the end. He recognizes them, even though he can’t actually see them. He recognizes their heart.

They’re from his past, which is sitting comfortably behind him, returned to him at last. He remembers the Galra, and everything before and after. He isn’t conscious of every second of it, but he knows that if he looks, he will find it. He’s present. He’s himself. Not the same as he was, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s a rare and beautiful thing for him to even exist, and a rare and incredible gift that he’s still alive. He’ll take it. There was never a chance he wouldn’t change as he lived. What happened to him wasn’t a change of his choosing, to be sure, but so few things are. He can accept that, now.

He knows what’s ahead of him, and it’s life, and life, and life, and life. More incredible and unpredictable and terrible and joyous than he can imagine, and he knows he won’t be alone.

Somehow, he knows: he’s never going to be alone again. The knowledge feels different than the knowledge of his returned memory. He doesn’t think this will stay with him, when he goes back. It’s okay. It’s okay. His heart knows it. Maybe he’ll be able to trust it a little easier, going forward.

The band pulls tight, tight. But he welcomes it, now - he’s resting easy, he’s relaxed and whole. He’s ready. There’s no way to tell how long he’s been away.

The last thing Shiro sees is a galaxy, a bright pinwheel against a light-studded background. He recognizes it the way he’d recognized every younger version of his own heart: the Milky Way was everything he knew for so long. Now it’s a river of stars he sees from afar, that he dips his fingers into. Its arms spin against the inky backdrop of space, moving forward, endlessly moving on. Earth is in there, somewhere, he knows. It’s not the same Earth he left, so long ago.

It’s not what he waits to return to.

The band snaps.

 

* * *

 

Maybe it’s the lanterns. Maybe it’s the black lion’s searching. Maybe it’s simply time.

Shiro filters from one dimension to the next particle by particle, a sensation like being poured through a sieve. There’s a brief period of daysminuteshours in which light skews strangely around him, something so subtle he doesn’t even notice at first. Then he looks over his shoulder, looks around a corner, looks through a layer of time thin as gauze and sees himself, younger; sees himself with black hair, unblemished face, with two human hands, and he’s - planting herbs with his mother, dirt smudged on his little cheekbone, and he’s - waking up in a shack in the desert - arriving at the Garrison by hovertrain, sweating hand closed tight around his rucksack’s strap, and he’s - tugging on a pair of boots - clutching the awful weight of his prosthetic - got his own blood in his mouth - closing his hands on Black’s controls for the first time, and he’s -

Gasping with his own lungs, with the weight of air pressing in on him. It’s cold as he breathes it in, cold because his body is warm, because he’s alive. His eyes fly open.

There are lights, the kind he recognizes. A low blue glow suffusing everything. Bright points of purple that pulse gently, slow heartbeats. And dim yellow, bleeding in from outside.

He’s in Black’s cockpit. She’s in her hangar, in the castle.

His lion is slow to wake around him, but wake she does. Her mind stirs against his, and the purple lights

glow,

fade,

glow,

hold.

Red has a habit of rescuing Keith, but Black has come for Shiro, too - when she let Keith pilot her, when he proved himself to her in front of Zarkon. And here, now. Reaching for him in every way she can. She returns to him from the other end of a long tether.

Shiro takes a breath as she comes fully awake, and when he breathes out, the last of him settles into place. Firmly in one body, firmly in one place, one time.

Keith’s blanket nest is shoved into a corner, temporarily vacant. The glow stick lanterns he’d set up are mostly out. If Shiro hadn’t grown accustomed to seeing even the smallest wonders, he would say they are out entirely. But they’re not - not yet.

When he stands, his legs are shaky. His skin can feel every thread of clothing against it, can feel the air as it shifts. The light is too bright, even though it’s almost nothing. His eyes water every time he looks at the windows of Black’s eyes for too long.

His whole body feels new. It’s not; he can tell without looking that his prosthetic arm is still there, that all his old scars are there. But still, he feels new. He remembers what it felt like to carry none of that weight.

With a deep rumble, the black lion awakens. The lights stay off, but he can feel the turning of her incomprehensible machinery beneath his feet. She brushes against his mind with the gentlest touch he can conceive of. Checking in. Welcoming him home.

Her head lifts, and he staggers a little as Black picks herself up off the floor, where she’s been slumped this whole time. Briefly, Shiro wonders how long that was, realizes it doesn’t matter. The system they use to measure time here isn’t what he was experiencing, before.

Black rolls onto her feet, but immediately settles her head back on the floor. Outside, someone shouts.

Shiro palms the hatch, and it opens, solid beneath his touch once more. His head spins to be so anchored, to be so confined, but he doesn’t really mind. He’s back. It’s all that matters.

The hatch opens to reveal Hunk and Coran, backlit by the glaring lights of the hangar bay. They squint in at him, and Hunk takes a cautious step up the ramp, and Shiro realizes that it’s dark in the cockpit, that they can’t see him. Until he moves.

“Hey,” he says, and his voice comes out scratchy and warbling, cracking from disuse.

“Holy shit,” Hunk says, and he scrambles into the cockpit. He’s holding a tool of some kind, and tosses it out behind him, out of the way. Shiro flinches from the sound of it clattering across the floor, and Hunk stops, hands outstretched. “We missed you, man. Are you okay? What can I do?”

Coran has vanished; he must be passing along the news. For now, it’s just Shiro and Hunk. He remembers the way Hunk had sat with Lance, the way he hadn’t let Lance blame himself. How steady Hunk’s heart is. How safe.

“I missed you too,” he says, quirking a smile, and he gets his arms around Hunk and lets himself be pulled in tight.

They’re almost of a height, he and Hunk. He’s one of the only people Shiro can tuck himself into, ducking his head and absorbing how good it is to touch again. Hunk is warm and alive and electric, and it’s such a miracle that they’re both here, existing. Such a miracle to be alive, together, now; out of all the moments that have ever been or ever will be, out of all the vastness that exists - they’re here, impossibly, in the same place, in the same moment. Shiro sighs, and the breath in his chest is a nebula brimming with life.

A hesitant footstep, boots on metal, and Black sings to him: Coran has come back. Shiro lifts his head from Hunk’s shoulder, but doesn’t pull away.

“I’ll explain later, okay?” he says, and Coran waves it away.

“There’s no rush.” His face changes; in the dim light, he is as earnest as Shiro has ever seen him. “You’re really alright, Shiro?”

Shiro blinks. Considers. Takes stock. Hunk’s hands rest flat and heavy and warm on his back, and his eyes aren’t watering so much anymore. “No,” Shiro says, “I’m great.”

Hunk hums, pleased. For a moment, Shiro has a flash of memory: creatures singing in the deep bells of their lungs as their forelimbs worked to gather food, great canopies of ancient trees that cast shade down on all of them.

The memory slips and fades, and Shiro lets it go. He understands this knowledge is not his to keep. But the feeling stays. If he wanted to, he thinks he could still sing the song. It’s something that lives deeper in him than memory. It’s enough.

At last, he pulls away, and Hunk lets him go. But he stays at Shiro’s side, close enough that Shiro can sense the tingle of his presence on his own skin. It’s an echo of the energy that sings in himself: the indelible electricity of living, the ghost that lives in the synapses of his brain, that gives his muscle and bone and blood a name and an identity, the core of who he is. Standing this close, Shiro feels the different current that powers Hunk, the different places where it lights and dims.

It’s a deep feeling, half-forgotten. An instinct. Something human that has almost been lost, but isn’t quite gone. Not yet.

Hunk’s voice is quiet. “You’re really okay? You’re kind of...strange.”

“Yeah,” Shiro says at once. He doesn’t want to move. Doesn’t want to leave this moment, the newness of it. “I’m just adjusting.”

Coran sighs. “And here I was hoping the new black paladin would be less cryptic than the first. Ah, well.” He’s holding a scanner of some kind that he’s pointing at Shiro, but he doesn’t seem alarmed by whatever he’s seeing with it. He twiddles a knob.

Hunk is frowning at the floor. “Hey, what’s with the blankets? And the...what are those?” He picks up the jug that Keith had left on Black’s seat. “What the...”

“Lanterns,” Shiro says, and doesn’t elaborate. Something in his tone must have settled the matter; Hunk puts it back where he found it.

Coran looks up from his device, ears twitching. “Finally. We really do need to work on your team’s response times. That was much too slow.”

Shiro laughs, and the sound fills him up, startling him. His heart feels too big for his chest to contain it.

And the rest of his team comes around the corner.

They’re rushing; Keith skids a little, almost loses his footing, but catches himself at the last second. His eyes snap up, meet Shiro’s across the hangar bay. See him standing there, in the mouth of Black’s cockpit. And he stops where he is and just stares, expression unreadable, as Pidge and Lance hurtle past him.

“Shiro!” Pidge cries, waving, and he lifts a hand in response. She thunders up the ramp with Lance on her heels, throws herself into his arms. Then she pulls back, punches him in the bicep once, hard, and tucks herself back in. He smiles into her hair, reaches out with his other hand for Lance, who’s waiting, who steps in as soon as he’s invited, who holds him hard.

“Sorry,” Shiro says. “I didn’t mean to go.”

“It’s okay. You came back,” Lance says, muffled against Shiro’s shoulder.

Shiro looks over Lance’s head at Keith, who hasn’t come any closer. He’s still standing, still staring. But when he sees Shiro looking at him, his face changes, and he bolts before Shiro can figure out what it means.

Beside him, Hunk sighs. “Yeah, Keith didn’t take it super well.”

“How long have I been gone?” Shiro asks as Pidge and Lance pull away, because it’s finally occurred to him to.

Lance and Pidge and Hunk stand in a circle around him. Black hums, content, beneath his feet. The Paladins glance at each other.

“A week, give or take,” Pidge offers at last. “How long did you think you were gone?”

An hour, he almost says. Or a lifetime, maybe. A millenia. He remembers exhaling a decade, inhaling an era. Time stretching and folding back upon itself. “It doesn’t matter,” he says, after a pause that’s just the far side of too long.

The Paladins glance at each other again, but don’t ask anything more. Maybe they don’t want to know. Maybe they just believe him.

Coran clears his throat. “Allura will want to see you.”

“Where is she?” Shiro asks.

“Piloting,” Coran says. “We’re in the middle of a wormhole jump.”

Shiro nods, and his Paladins let him go. He steps out of their company the way he’d stepped out of his armour, out of his guilt. Easily. Knowing he can come back to them just as easily as he’d left, if he chooses to.

Some part of him hopes that Keith will be there, around the corner, but he’s not. Keith hasn’t forgiven him, and that’s fair. This is the second time, willingly or not, that Shiro’s vanished on him. The second time Keith has had to grieve for him. He needs time, and Shiro’s happy to give it.

So, instead of going looking for him, Shiro goes to the bridge. Allura isn’t much of a hugger, and she has to leave one hand on the controls for the moment. But she turns and watches him approach, white hair shining in the light, standing tall and regal and controlled. When he’s close enough, she reaches out to brush her fingers over his shoulder, then over his cheek, a princess welcoming her knight home, a ruler humbling herself for just a moment.

“Welcome back, Shiro,” she says, and it’s a relief to hear her and understand her, and Shiro closes his eyes and lets her words sink in.

Outside the windows, the universe rushes by. It’s a blur of stars, of light, of entire galaxies stuffed full of life and creation. He’s seen so much of it. He doesn’t remember the specifics, doesn’t remember the shape of the singers whose voices still sound in his very deepest memories. He wonders if this is how Allura and Coran feel sometimes. So much of what they knew ten thousand years ago has expired, has vanished. It must feel like living in a world of ghosts.

“I’m home,” Shiro says.

For the first time in his waking memory, it feels true to say that. The castle was safe, before, but his place in it had been made of his fear, his vigilance, his distrust. All of that is gone, now.

He’s past it. He’s safe, in heart and body. He’s safe.

For the first time in years, Shiro’s home.  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> this fic was written for the gen mini bang, so keep your eye on this collection for more great stuff coming down the pipe! the Irreverent Working Title(tm) for this one was 'fuk ya ghosty'


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